vienna

date: mon 8 jun 15
tags: vienna
Day 2 - Monday 8th June
The next day we had at least had a decent rest as the first day we were suffering from sleep deprivation after the night train.
This is a display of single malts one the short walk from the hotel to the local metro
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The plan was to each get a 3 day "vienna card" as this gives unlimited metro and tram travel and saves faffing about buying individual tickets. There are also some discounts to be had, so we walked to the local "volkstheatre" metro station and took the U2 line to praterstern where there is a sort of theme park called Prater - one of the main attractions is the big wheel. The picture below is the praterstern metro & shopping area - quite a large station as serves both U1 & U2 lines and the S-bahn
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The big wheel is called the Wiener Riesenrad and the views are very good - this is the view north east towards the vienna UN centre and you can also see the Donauturm tower with it's revolving cafe bar.
We realised that the tower could be visited to just needed to work out the metro stop to take us there - only 3 stops on the U1 line
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Before heading to the Donauturm we had a refreshing beer at the base of the Riesenrad
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After our beer we headed back to Praterstern and took the U1 line as far as Kaisermühlen VIC - the last bit stands for Vienna International Centre
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U Snack at Kaisermühlen VIC metro - this whole area seemed very modern but dates from the 70's although many buildings are a lot newer
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The VIC itself looked very impressive with circular shaped buildings up to 28 floors in height
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I quite like the design of this modern residential building with balconies all the way round
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This looks like an older 1970's "tower block" style of flats and impressive in the number of storeys - it looked in good condition compared with the same type of block in the UK
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It was quite a long walk to the TV tower through a large park - there were a lot of signs saying "no golf", "golf kills" etc
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Luckily there was no queue for the lift and it is very fast and has a glass roof so you can see the lift shaft above you.
They have toilets with fantastic views, even the cubicles! There is a really good cafe and we had some soft drinks while we did a 360 degree rotation which takes about 40 minutes at a guess.
Below is the metro station with a good pattern to the windows.
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This building is good with a pattern on the side
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Inside the metro station - this one is raised up rather than below ground
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